Abstract

COMMUNICATIONS
The Civil Contingencies Act (2004) in the
United Kingdom introduced new responsibil- ABOUT RESILIENCE
ities for public authorities regarding Business
Continuity Management (BCM) and other ENHANCING
emergency planning activities. Using content
analysis techniques, this study examined
thirty-four English county councils’ websites
ACTIVITIES BY
to examine the extent to which this online
medium communicated these new responsi-
ENGLISH LOCAL
bilities to stakeholders. Using key-word-in-
context (KWIC) and content clustering, this
AUTHORITIES
exploratory study found that local authorities’
websites were far from generic in their web-
An evaluation of online content
based communications about their new Civil
Contingencies Act responsibilities and BCM Brahim Herbane
activities, and it reveals a number of differing
website traits, motivations and orientations.
Brahim Herbane
Department of Strategic Management and Marketing
Leicester Business School
De Montfort University
Key words Leicester
Business Continuity Management, Civil UK
Contingencies Act, crisis management, E-mail: bhcor@dmu.ac.uk
emergency planning, risk communication

Vol. 13 Issue 7 2011 919–939

Public Management Review ISSN 1471-9037 print/ISSN 1471-9045 online
Ó 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2011.589611
920 Public Management Review

INTRODUCTION

Business Continuity Management (BCM) originated in the commercial sector to improve

an organization’s resilience to, and recovery from, serious business interruptions. With
the presence of large scale threats (including terrorism, utility failure, extreme weather
events and pandemics) the need for multi-agency emergency responses has become
increasingly recognized within a broader impetus to improve resilience to such threats.
With the implementation of the Civil Contingencies Act (CCA) in November 2004,
local authorities have (under Part 1: Local Arrangements for Civil Protection) a number
of responsibilities in terms of their own emergency planning and BCM along with
responsibilities to support and promote BCM to local businesses and voluntary
organizations and the use of websites has been advocated as a medium to communicate
with stakeholders about these responsibilities. This study examines the extent to which
local authorities’ websites reflect these new duties under the Civil Contingencies Act
(2004) and assesses the qualities of local government websites in relation to the Act.
The contributions of the article are as follows. First, local authority websites are a
formally advocated communications medium for CCA-related responsibilities. Their
content in relation to statutory responsibilities has not been examined in a systematic
and comparative way prior to this study. Second, local authority websites provide a
portal for stakeholders to access information about specific council activities relating to
BCM and other emergency planning activities. The study highlights the heterogeneous
nature of such information, despite local authorities having uniform responsibilities.
Third, free and accessible website information/advice are important for small and
medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and voluntary organizations. This article contributes
to the understanding about Government-to-Citizen (G2C) and Government-to-Business
(G2B) linkages using information and communications technologies (ICT).
Finally, the article contributes to emerging consideration of the use of ICT in the
context of public management and administration at a time when organizations are
increasingly vulnerable to disruption from ICT problems, and in which these
technologies are being used to facilitate e-government and public service delivery. It has
been suggested that prior research ‘has not taken the possibility of a substantial time gap
between the introduction of new ICTs, such as the Internet, in the public sector and
fundamental change outcomes resulting from the use of these technologies into account’
(Lips and Schuppan 2009: 744).

THE CIVIL CONTINGENCIES ACT AND LOCAL AUTHORITY EMERGENCY

PLANNING

Until the introduction of the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the focus of civil
protection arrangements had been a hostile military act from a foreign power (O’Brien
and Read 2005). In the Act’s new definition, an emergency now refers to:
 Herbane: An evaluation of online content 921

(a) an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United
Kingdom, (b) an event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment of a place in the
United Kingdom, or (c) war, or terrorism, which threatens serious damage to the security of the United
Kingdom.
(CCA 2004: Part 1, Section 1)

Geographically, Part 1 of the Act applies in England with some changes in guidance,
arrangements, consultation and powers to reflect devolution settlements in Scotland
and Wales, but the Act does not apply to Northern Ireland because of the development
of the Northern Ireland Civil Contingencies Framework (Civil Contingencies
Secretariat 2005).
Organizations responsible for emergency responses are classified according to their
proximity to the control over an emergency response. Category 1 responders (‘core
responders’) include the ‘blue light’ emergency services, local authorities, health
authorities and the Environment Agency. The ‘co-operating responders’ that are
referred to as Category 2 responders include utilities providers, transport operators and
regulators, and the Health and Safety Executive.
Category 1 and 2 responders are required by Section 2 of the Act to assess, plan
and advise in relation to their contingency planning arrangements.1 Duties include
periodic emergency risk assessment, risk prevention and mitigation planning in order
that Category 1 and 2 responders can provide continuity of its activities. Further
duties require responders to publish their assessments and plans where advice or
assistance to other bodies (or the public) might be beneficial in the prevention or
response to an emergency.2 The Act extends the local authority’s role from one of
undertaking contingency planning for its own activities and communicating with
relevant parties, to providing advice to other organizations to develop, improve (and
possibly integrate) their own emergency response arrangements. Section 4 (subsection
1) of the Act places a duty upon local authorities (whether county, district, borough,
city, county borough or common) to ‘provide advice and assistance to the public in
connection with the making of arrangements for the continuance of commercial
activities . . . [or] whose activities are not carried on for profit, in the event of an
emergency’.
Supporting the Act are the Contingency Planning Regulations (2005). In addition to
ad hoc arrangements, multi-agency co-operation and the co-ordination activities and
responsibilities between Category 1 and 2 responders are facilitated through ‘Local
Resilience Forums’ (LRF; organized according to police force area). Local authorities
are a central protagonist in Local Resilience Forums since the secretariat to the LRF is
domiciled within the Emergency Planning Unit of the Council and the Chief Emergency
Planning Officer serves as its Secretary. Within London, the thirty-three Boroughs are
clustered into six Local Resilience Areas. A further responsibility of Local Resilience
Forums is the maintenance of a Community Risk Register containing the risk assessments of
forum members.
922 Public Management Review

BUSINESS CONTINUITY MANAGEMENT

Business Continuity Management (BCM) has been described as ‘a process that helps
manage risks to the smooth running of an organisation or delivery of a service, ensuring
continuity of critical functions in the event of a disruption, and effective recovery
afterwards’ (UK Resilience 2008). The BCM process involves organizational, supply
chain, stakeholder and risk analysis which informs countermeasure and Business
Continuity Plan(s) development (to address threats and vulnerabilities identified in the
preceding analysis). An implementation phase follows, using training and testing to
build resilience, situational awareness and embed business recovery capabilities
(Herbane et al. 2004). The frameworks, tools and processes of BCM have emerged
since the 1970s when Disaster Recovery Planning was introduced to deal with the
interruptions that would arise from information technology failures (Ginn 1989;
Andersen 1992; Strohl Systems 1995; Turley 2003). With a facilities (building) focus in
the 1980s and the emergence of a process/business orientation in the 1990s, Disaster
Recovery Planning (DRP) became (BCP) (Smith and Sherwood 1995). During this
period, the concept of institutional resilience began to emerge (Rosethal and Kouzmin
1996). The final transition from BCP to BCM took place in the late 1990s and early
2000s as Business Continuity became an embedded enterprise-wide and enterprise-
spanning activity among leading practice companies in sectors such as financial services,
utilities and information technology.3 Research about BCM practices in organizations is
well established in a large enterprise context (Morganti 2002; Cerullo and Cerullo
2004; Pitt and Goyal 2004; Gallagher 2005; Zsidisin et al. 2005; Jackson 2006; Sevcik
2007; Wainwright 2007) but the literature is far less developed in its understanding of
BCM in the small and medium-sized enterprise, voluntary and public sector contexts
(Herbane 2010). The planning and implementation framework currently advocated by
the British government for the implementation of (and advice provided about) BCM
follows the BS25999 British Standard for BCM (BSI 2006).

WEBSITES AS RESOURCE AND SERVICE GATEWAYS

After more than a decade of the ‘internet age’, websites have become a de facto
information gateway through which a variety of stakeholders can access information.
McIvor et al. (2002) found that one of the key benefits of internet technologies for local
authorities was the ability to enhance service provision by linking different systems and
processes. Although immediate cost comparison is not always possible with other
information provisions approaches, the use of websites as an ‘outreach tool’ for BCM is
likely to be cost effective given the existing presence of a website for general local
authority website already. Although the CCA itself does not explicitly refer to the use
of websites, the official guidance on the implementation of Part 1 of the CCA 2004
(Cabinet Office 2005) advocates the use of websites as a way to provide assistance and
 Herbane: An evaluation of online content 923

generic advice. Walker and Broderick (2006: 113) suggest that promotional activities
for BCM assistance ‘may be offered through an authority’s economic development unit,
emergency planning unit, or any other appropriate vehicle and may be delivered by
materials, including booklets and videos, website, and seminars and meetings’. In their
role in facilitating Government-to-Citizen (G2C) and Government-to-Business (G2B)
interaction (Lips and Schuppan 2009), local authority websites and, specifically, content
relating to CCA obligations, reflect what Osborne (2010: 1) has recently characterized
‘a pluralist environment where the delivery of public services requires the negotiation
of complex inter-organizational relationships and multi-actor policymaking processes’.
Local authorities now have a role as an information consultation and guidance hub for
emergency planning and business continuity issues, with formal relationships between
local authorities and resilience forums, the public and central government, and informal
and ad hoc relationships with organizations seeking advice and guidance. These
formalized relationships also reflect multi-actor policy making by informing central
government’s National Risk Register (Cabinet Office 2008).
While guidance on the implementation of the CCA (Cabinet Office 2005) indicates
the need for Category 1 responder organizations to communicate using online
content, and provide advice and promote BCM activities using this medium, far less
direction is given in relation to communicating with stakeholders about an
organization’s own arrangements for BCM and the extent of other resilience-based
activities that have become an important tenet of multi-agency disaster management.
Clearly, online references to the presence of BCM arrangements are not the same as
an indication of the effectiveness of those arrangements in the event of a crisis upon
which they are relied. The study sets out to highlight observable differences between
organizations that (ostensibly) are equally compelled to communicate with
stakeholders about a specific area of their activity. There is a further degree of
separation between what is communicated about resilience and resilience itself since
this is an intangible organizational characteristic that conflates luck, foresight,
expertise, experience and formal planning. There may be a number of influences on
the differences in what is communicated about local authorities’ arrangements,
including the legacy of secretiveness about emergency plans, confidentiality, lack of
experience or inertia in website usage, or where those involved directly in Emergency
Management and BCM differ from those responsible for writing copy and uploading it
to the local authorities’ website. With these caveats in mind, the study posits the
following questions:

. To what extent do local authorities’ websites reflect their duties under the CCA
2004?
. What are the qualities of local authorities’ websites in relation to the
requirements of the CCA?
. How do local authorities’ websites vary in their orientation and in the provenance
of their content?
924 Public Management Review

RESEARCH DESIGN

The systematic analysis of website content is uncommon in the academic literature.

Some examples include the analysis of advertising and online marketing activities
(Philport and Arbittier 1997; Dou et al. 2002) and corporate image and mission
statements (Lamertz et al. 2005; Peyrefitte and David 2006). As ‘the systematic,
objective, quantitative analysis of message characteristics’ (Neuendorf 2002: 1), content
analysis is appropriate given the nature of the data (website text) and the nature of the
study’s questions which seek to evaluate content against a known criterion and
categories (provisions and guidance relating to the CCA and BCM). A content analytical
study can highlight issues of prevalence, help to take stock of issues at a given point in
time and assist in the unfurling of implications arising from the exploration of the issues
(Poon and Rowley 2007).
Data were collected from all thirty-four English county councils (devolved
regions of the United Kingdom were not included because of the differences in
their civil contingencies arrangements). The sampling frame was based on county
councils because their geographical coverage/remit includes rural as well as urban
environments. The dataset was built as follows: first, each English county council’s
website was searched for text relating to the Civil Contingencies Act (CCA) and
Business Continuity Management (BCM). In addition to preserving the website’s
content offline, each council’s website was evaluated in terms of its structure of
CCA and BCM material (whether on one page or spanning several pages),4 graphic/
text mix, availability of downloadable materials and links to other websites. Next,
the preserved offline content for each council was coded using NVivo 2 software.
The author developed a coding frame/coding scheme (Table 1) comprising of ex
ante constructed nodes that were used to code each of the text files. A code refers
to a meaning or characteristic within the text that the researcher wishes to assign to
a fragment of text to improve ease of retrieval and serve as precursor to a
systematic analysis of these conceptual categories. These ex ante nodes were used in
a trial coding exercise with a second coder to identify whether any nodes were
ambiguous or required amendment, clarification or removal. This two stage coding
development echoes the approaches adopted in Griffith and Krampf (1998) and Dou
et al. (2002).
The coding of website information (using two coders) was subjected to agreement-
oriented inter-coder reliability testing. The Holst co-efficient of agreement
(Neuendorf 2002: 149) was used because of the categorical (nominal) nature of
the data and because the need for precision in the coder’s scoring coupled with a high
threshold for an acceptable co-efficient makes for a strict criterion upon which to
assess reliability (Neuendorf (2002: 143) posits that 0.8 or 80 percent would be
‘acceptable in most situations’).5 Each variable (node) was subjected to reliability
coefficient testing. Rather than test a subsample of variables, all variables were tested
to ensure the strongest level of representativeness in the inter-reliabilities. Only three
 Herbane: An evaluation of online content 925

Table 1: Coding scheme

3rd party content – business continuity

3rd party content – crisis management
3rd party content – disaster management
Advice provided for other organizations
Business community (as a stakeholder)
Case studies
Community Risk Register
Council’s business continuity activities
Disease (threat type)
Downloadable content
Fire (threat type)
Flood (threat type)
General public (as a stakeholder)
IT failure (threat type)
Links to third parties
Local Resilience Forum
Original content – business continuity
Original content – crisis management
Original content – disaster planning
Other identifiable audiences (as a stakeholder)
Other public bodies
Other specified threat types (threat type)
Reference to the BCI or BS25999
Resilience
Risk Assessment
Small and medium-sized firm-related content
Terrorism (threat type)
The Civil Contingencies Act (2004)
Utility failure (threat type)

of the nodes in the coding scheme fell below perfect agreement; for the ‘advice
provided’ node, disagreement over five units gave a reliability co-efficient of .94
while there was disagreement about two units relating to ‘council’s BCP activities’
giving this node a coefficient of .97. Disagreement about one unit for the ‘resilience’
node gave it a co-efficient of .95. Taking these and the resulting average coefficient of
.98, high reliability can be reported. Data analysis includes an evaluation of key-
words-in-context (KWIC) (Neuendorf 2002; Denscombe 2003), code occurrence
analysis and the development of a taxonomic scheme of council website’s CCA and
BCM content.
926 Public Management Review

RESULTS

Website profiles and thematic occurrence

Analysis of the thirty-four county council websites’ content relating to the CCA and
BCM revealed notable differences in the organization, appearance, volume and location
of the relevant material (Table 2).
The coding of website content identified the types of threats mentioned (Table 3).
Flooding was the most commonly cited threat type followed by utility failure, disease
and fire. The frequencies of flood and disease references are not entirely surprising
given the rural constituencies of county councils. In contrast, terrorism and IT failures
were cited in fewer than a third of the thirty-four county councils, suggesting that while
these may be strong influences on the development of BCM and the CCA, they feature
less frequently than threats that may have had a greater and more recent impact on
these local authorities.
A total of twenty-nine substantive codes were used to analyse the website
content (Table 4). All but two codes were used (the presence of third party
content relating to crisis management and disaster management). Of the twenty-
seven codes found in the website content, no code was universally used across all
websites. The most popular (original content referring to BCM) was still absent
from 9 percent of councils. Conversely, reference to the general public as a
stakeholder was absent in 97 percent of councils’ content. In between these
extremes, Table 4 shows the wide variety in the presence of coding themes in the

Table 2: Indicative characteristics of local authority websites

Frequency (N ¼ 34) Per cent

Visual characteristics
Graphic-text mix 14 41.18
Text only 20 58.82
Text location
Multiple page locations for CCA and BCM text 24 70.59 Avg 1289
Single page location for CCA and BCM text 10 29.41 Avg 1277
Uniform resource locator type6
Static (e.g. htm) 7 21%79%
Dynamic (e.g. asp/aspx, jsp, cfm) 27
Text volumes
Word count (mean)
Average number of words per site 1,254 words
Min/Max 412/5,181 words
 Herbane: An evaluation of online content 927

Table 3: Threat types

Code Frequency (N ¼ 34) Per cent

Flood 22 64.71
Utility failure 16 47.06
Disease 13 38.24
Fire 13 38.24
Terrorism 11 32.35
IT failure 6 17.65
Other specified threat types 18 52.94
Weather (unspecified) 4 11.76
Weather (cold) 3 8.82
Loss of key staff 3 8.82
Supplier/financier failure 2 5.88
Theft/vandalism/fraud 2 5.88
Transportation interruption 2 5.88
Weather (heat) 2 5.88
Weather (storm – wind/gale) 2 5.88
Pollution 1 2.94
Denial of access 1 2.94
Food contamination 1 2.94
Industrial action 1 2.94
Bad publicity 1 2.94
Coastal erosion 1 2.94

sample. Only three nodes could be found in over 75 percent of the thirty-four
councils and these include links to other websites7 and downloadable content (plan
templates, policies, assessment forms, etc).
For those codes found in greater than 50 percent of councils, there is a clear (but
not overwhelming) tendency to inform the public about its own activities, provide
information about BCM and the CCA and to provide advice to website users. Fewer
than half (47 percent) made reference to the existence of a Community Risk
Register. Noticeable in Table 4 is the infrequent appearance of explicit references to
external stakeholders. For instance, fewer than half of websites refer to the business
community, other public bodies, the general public and other identifiable audiences
(such as staff, customers, banks and suppliers). Similarly, less than a third of websites
make reference to resilience, BS25999, and small and medium-sized enterprise
(SME)-related content. BCM is discussed in many websites in the context of the
council’s own business continuity activities (68 percent). Only three councils used
case studies as vehicles to communicate the importance of BCM and emergency
planning.
928 Public Management Review

Table 4: Substantive codes’ (includes unused codes) presence in websites

Code (reference to) Frequency (N ¼ 34) Per cent

Original content – business continuity 31 91.18

Links to third parties 30 88.24
Downloadable content 29 85.29
Advice provided for other organizations 24 70.59
The Civil Contingencies Act (2004) 24 70.59
Council’s business continuity activities 23 67.65
Flood (threat type) 22 64.71
3rd party content – business continuity 20 58.82
Local Resilience Forum 18 52.94
Other specified threat types (threat type) 18 52.94
Business community (as a stakeholder) 16 47.06
Community Risk Register 16 47.06
Utility failure (threat type) 16 47.06
Disease (threat type) 13 38.24
Fire (threat type) 13 38.24
Original content – disaster planning 13 38.24
Risk assessment 13 38.24
Terrorism (threat type) 11 32.35
Other public bodies 9 26.47
Small and medium-sized firm-related content 9 26.47
Resilience 8 23.53
Other identifiable audiences (as a stakeholder) 7 20.59
IT failure (threat type) 6 17.65
Reference to the BCI or BS25999 5 14.71
Case studies 3 8.82
Original content – crisis management 2 5.88
General public (as a stakeholder) 1 2.94
3rd party content – crisis management 0 0
3rd party content – disaster management 0 0

CCA content alignment and key-words-in-context

Given the requirements of the CCA and its associated guidelines and regulation, we
might expect certain content to be more frequently cited. Specifically, by coding the
presence of codes in a binary fashion (a rating of 1 if it was found within a website and 0
if it was absent), non-parametric chi-square tests could be used to test for differences in
the usage of theme/text attributes across the sample of local authorities. Table 5
indicates that there was a significantly different use of fourteen codes across the county
 Herbane: An evaluation of online content 929

Table 5: Coded item occurrence (chi-square)

Asymp. Sig.
Coded items (theme/text attributes) Included% Excluded% Chi-square x2 (p-value)

Original content – business continuity 91 9 23.059 .000

Links to third parties 88 12 19.882 .000
Downloadable content 85 15 16.941 .000
The Civil Contingencies Act (2004) 71 29 5.765 .016
Advice provided for others organizations 71 29 5.765 .016
Council’s business continuity activities 68 32 4.235 .040
Flood (threat type) 65 35 2.941 .086
3rd party content – business continuity 59 41 1.059 .303
Other specified threat types (threat type) 53 47 .118 .732
Local Resilience Forum 53 47 .118 .732
Utility failure (threat type) 47 53 .030 .862
Community Risk Register 47 53 .118 .732
Business community (as a stakeholder) 47 53 .118 .732
Fire (threat type) 38 62 1.882 .170
Risk assessment 38 62 1.882 .170
Disease (threat type) 38 62 1.882 .170
Original content – disaster planning 38 62 1.882 .170
Terrorism (threat type) 32 68 4.235 .040
Other public bodies 26 74 7.529 .006
Small and medium-sized firm-related content 26 74 7.529 .006
Resilience 24 76 9.529 .002
Other identifiable audiences 21 79 11.765 .001
IT failure (threat type) 18 82 14.235 .000
Reference to the BCI or BS25999 15 85 16.941 .000
Case studies 9 91 23.059 .000
Original content – crisis management 6 94 26.471 .000
General public (as a stakeholder) 3 97 30.118 .000

councils in the study (p 5.05). Five codes were used by at least 70 percent of the local
authorities in the sample. Despite the importance of Community Risk Registers and
Local Resilience Forums as vehicles for the implementation of CCA obligations, no
significant differences could be found in their usage within the sample of county
councils. At the other extreme, nine codes were present in fewer than 26 percent of
local authorities. There were no significant differences across local authorities in the use
of the remaining codes (p 5.05). The infrequent inclusion of SME content, references
to resilience and to the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) and BS25999 are also
noteworthy because these themes are integral to the implementation of BCM good
930 Public Management Review

practice and CCA obligations. Superficiality was evident in the content relating to BCM
and CCA issues. Specifically, the volume of text dedicated to SME content, references
to resilience and to the BCI and BS25999 amounted to 2.8 percent of the total volume
of text that was collected from the thirty-four websites. In contrast, text referring to
downloadable content (NB not the content itself – merely the text which describes and
links to it), links to third party websites, advice provided and content relating to BCM
accounted for 49.2 percent of the total volume of text. Conversely, references to
Community Risk Registers and Local Resilience Forums accounted for only 4.5 percent
of the text collected.
Within references to the CCA, seven contextual themes emerged: Roles and
responsibilities; Local Resilience Forums; Promotion of Business Continuity; Back-
ground to the Act; Implementation of Business Continuity within the Council;
Community Risk Register; and Framework for Civil Protection (Table 6). The most
frequent context in which the CCA is referred to is that of the new roles and
responsibilities as a Category 1 responder (88 percent of the twenty-four councils). The
remaining contextual themes occurred much less frequently (ranging in presence from
29 percent to 17 percent of CCA references). The infrequent references to six of the
seven themes within text referring to the CCA are limited efforts to explain the what,
why and how of the CCA for the local authority. However, absent from the text is
reference to the fact that all local authorities would have had processes, resources and
structures for emergency management prior to the introduction of the CCA.
Key-word-in-context analysis for ‘Business Continuity Management’ identified eight
contextual themes: definition/what BCM is; Council’s BCM activities; BCM for others;
Connections to the CCA; BCM and SMEs; the BCM Process; BCM and stakeholders;
and BCM and emergency planning (Table 7). Readers will recall from Table 4 that
thirty-one (91 percent) of councils made explicit reference to BCM. Only two contexts
were found in half or more of passages referring to BCM. These were definitions of
BCM (77 percent of the thirty-one councils) and references to the council’s BCM
activities (50 percent of the thirty-one councils). Councils either set out that they have
BCM but do not explain what it is, or councils explain what BCM is but do not specify
whether they have it in place. Although the principal focus of text about BCM relates to
its definition, references to the importance of BCM for other organizations are found in
less than a third of councils. Only nine of the thirty-one councils (26 percent) made an
explicit connection between BCM and the CCA. What is notable about such references
is that they refer to a duty placed on them to have BCM but no single council makes the
point that they have had BCM prior to the enactment of the CCA (which many of them
did). The text conveys a sense of compliance with the Act rather than (in some cases) of
the Act catching up with what the council already had.
Less common still were references to BCM in the context of its processes and
beneficiaries. Only one council provided information about the specific planning tools
such as ‘Business Impact Analysis’ (Hiles 2008). Furthermore, only one council
mentioned that BCM shares a role in providing organizational resilience with
 Herbane: An evaluation of online content 931

Table 6: Key-word-in-context – ‘Civil Contingencies Act’

Number of % of councils
Context occurrences (N ¼ 24) Examples

Roles and 21 88 CCA 2004 requires Category 1 responders to maintain

responsibilities plans to ensure that they can continue to perform their
functions in the event of an emergency, so far as is
reasonably practicable. This duty relates to all the
functions of a Category 1 responder, not just its civil
protection functions. (Cambridgeshire County Council)
Local Resilience 7 29 The principal mechanism for multi-agency co-operation
Forums under the Act is the Local Resilience Forum (LRF),
based on each police area. The forum is a process by
which the organisations on which the duty falls co-
operate with each other. It does not have a separate
legal personality, it does not have powers to direct its
members. (Cumbria County Council)
Promotion of 7 29 As part of seven new responsibilities under the Civil
Business Contingencies Act 2004 the Council is required to
Continuity promote Business Continuity to Businesses and the
Voluntary Sector. (Derbyshire County Council)
Background to the 7 29 The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 was passed through
Act Parliament in November 2004. The Act is designed to
replace and update previous legislation that governed
Emergency Planning and management in the UK.
(Dorset County Council)
Implementation of 6 25 The Civil Contingencies Act (2004) imposes a statutory
Business business continuity management duty upon local
Continuity within authorities and other local responding organisations.
the Council (Durham County Council)
Community Risk 6 25 The Kent Community Risk Register was prepared by the
Register Kent Category 1 Responders in accordance with the
Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and its associated
regulations and guidance. (Kent County Council)
Framework for Civil 4 17 The Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (CCA) provides the
Protection statutory framework for emergency planning in
England. (Bedfordshire County Council)

Note: N ¼ 24 (71 percent of county councils made reference to the Civil Contingencies Act on their websites).

emergency planning. There is a partial disconnection between what it is and what they
do as a council in respect of BCM. References to BCM rarely proceed beyond this and
into detailed realms of the process, beneficiaries and linkages with other resilience-
oriented activities.
932 Public Management Review

Table 7: Key-words-in-context – ‘Business Continuity Management’

% of councils
Context Occurrences (N ¼ 31) Examples

Definition/what 24 77 BCM ensures your essential business functions can

BCM is continue during a disruption and helps you to get back
to a normal level of operation as quickly as possible.
(Buckinghamshire County Council)
Council’s BCM 17 50 Local authorities must have adequate measures in place
activities to maintain essential services and subsequently
recover from the effects of significant disruption to
normal working. This process of increasing the local
authority resilience is known as Business Continuity
Management. (Lincolnshire County Council)
BCM for others 11 32 A business continuity plan covers all aspects of your
business, highlighting those requirements critical, to
keep the business running. A good business continuity
plan should include staff, resources and contractual
issues, therefore minimising the impact upon your
business as a whole. (North Yorkshire County Council)
Connections to 9 26 New Government legislation called the CCA2004, has
theCCA given Local Authorities the duty to provide businesses
and voluntary organisations with advice on Business
Continuity Management. This duty aims to ensure our
local businesses are able to quickly recover from
disruptions. A resilient business community creates a
resilient County. (Surrey County Council)
BCM and small 7 21 Whether you are a small market trader, a voluntary
firms organisation or a multi national or international
company the ability to respond quickly to disruptive
incidents is vital and having a Business Continuity Plan
could make the difference to the survival of your
organisation in the long term. (West Sussex County
Council)
The BCM Process 5 15 The four steps of developing a business continuity plan
are:
. know your business – understand the critical
functions your organisation needs to stay alive
. assess your risks – what effect will risks have upon
your business?
. formulate your plan – develop a checklist of actions
to be taken during an emergency

(continued)
 Herbane: An evaluation of online content 933

Table 7: (continued)

% of councils
Context Occurrences (N ¼ 31) Examples

. test your plan – once staff are aware of the plan,

make sure it will work. (Shropshire County Council)
BCM and 5 15 The goal of Business Continuity Management (BCM) is to
stakeholders safeguard services, the organisation’s reputation, and
our stakeholders. (Bedfordshire County Council)
BCM and 1 3 Resilience is made up of two main areas:
emergency . Business Continuity and
planning . Emergency Planning.
(Bedfordshire County Council)

Note: N ¼ 31 (91 percent of county councils referred to Business Continuity Management on their websites).

Commonalities, disparities and clusters

One might expect that the inclusion of content would correspond to a compliance issue
(e.g. resilience forums, risk registers, etc). Character counts8 for the coding themes
were used to cluster websites according to the provenance of the material and the
orientation of content. Provenance of content for each website was ascertained by
deducting the character counts of third party content from character counts for original
content. The orientation of content for each website was determined by deducting the
total character counts for the codes ‘Advice provided for other organizations’, ‘Case
studies’, ‘Downloadable content’, ‘links to third parties’ and ‘SME-related content’ (to
advise readers about what to do or where to seek information) from the total character
counts for the codes ‘The Civil Contingencies Act’, ‘Council’s Business Continuity
activities’, ‘Community Risk Register’ and ‘Local Resilience Forum’ (what the council
is doing and why it is doing it in relation to BCM). These net character counts for
provenance and orientation were used to plot the position of websites and clusters
(Figure 1).
The result of this clustering activity is visualized in Figure 1 and indicates that a wide
variety exists between the websites. With the content space divided into four cells
around the origin, the thirty-four websites are found to be located in three cells. In the
upper left cell, in which third party content and an orientation to inform predominate,
eleven websites are located. In the upper right cell, in which original content and an
orientation to inform predominate, eighteen websites are found. In the lower left cell,
in which orientation to advise and third party content predominate, five websites are
located. The lower right cell is not occupied by any websites (an advisory orientation
with original content). A further observation is that twenty-nine of the thirty-four
934 Public Management Review

Figure 1: Websites clustered according to orientation and provenance

websites adopt an inform orientation while only five have a predominantly advisory
orientation.

Cell 1: Inform/original
Over half (53 percent) of websites are located in this cell. The dominant orientation is
to inform rather than to advise and content is predominately original. Websites are well
scattered within this cell, with a group of websites that are close to the intersection of
the axes, indicating that while they have discernible characteristics in terms of
originality and intention to inform, these are not as strong as those for websites that are
located further from the south-western corner of this cell, where content (in terms of
originality and orientation to inform) is greater. The large population of the cell is a
reflection of the focus on informing stakeholders about the Council’s BCM and CCA-
led activities. Since this material is esoteric rather than generic given its context,
material is more likely to be generated internally.

Cell 2: Inform/third party

Cell 2 is populated by 32 percent of websites and the dominant orientation in terms of
the character counts is to inform but websites in this cell exhibited a predominance of
third party material. Within the cell, levels of the inform orientation are somewhat
more suppressed than in cell 1 (fewer websites are positioned in the centre or northern
sectors of the cell). Within this cell there are two notable outliers, one with a high
volume of inform-oriented information, the other with large volumes of third party
 Herbane: An evaluation of online content 935

information. These cases support the idea that provenance and orientation influence
each other (and counterbalance their extremes).

Cell 3: Advise/third party

Only 15 percent of websites are located in cell 3, which is characterized by a net
character count in favour of third party materials and an orientation to provide advice
about BCM to other organizations. The five websites in this cell are quite dispersed and
there is an outlier which contains a high volume of advisory content. The content was
built around materials sourced from the London Prepared website, the Emergency
Preparedness publication (Cabinet Office 2005) and the Local Resilience Forum website.
Given the strong association between original content and an orientation to inform (as
supported by the higher population of cell 1), the scarcity of websites in this cell is not
surprising. A tension exists between relying mainly on third party material while
serving to promote BCM and provide advice from the council – the content of the
message is broad while the purpose of the message is far more specific.

Cell 4: Advise/original
Cell 4 (a positive net character count for original material while exhibiting a
predominant orientation to advise rather than inform) is unoccupied. For a website to
be located here, predominantly original content would be generated in respect of the
advise orientation. Given that a council’s expertise does not reside in providing
consulting and advisory services for BCM, the resulting absence of websites in this cell
is not surprising.

DISCUSSION

Content analysis has revealed that websites only partially reflect county councils’ new
duties under the Act and its associated regulations. The absence of a single universal
code present across all websites in the study coupled with a wide variety in the presence
or otherwise of themes attest to the finding that websites are not used as a locale for
detailed information. The most frequent content tended to refer to the council’s own
activities rather than to provide advice to website visitors suggesting more of a publicity
than advisory focus for its content. Whether an ‘ideal’ website would contain reference
to all the themes coded in the study is a moot point. Clearly, authors of website content
need to consider matters of brevity, accessibility, relevance and value, but it remains
the case that the absence of varied content is more the norm than is its presence. In
addition, not all coded themes require a great deal of text (links and downloadable
content can be incorporated using little in the way of descriptive text) and hence the
additional text that is required to achieve comprehensiveness is lower than to achieve
936 Public Management Review

partial comprehensiveness. A website would not have to achieve comprehensiveness by

including text relating to all twenty-nine coded themes (Table 4). Instead, the top
sixteen codes (in terms of character counts in this study) would include all codes that
referred to roles, collaborative and promotional activities that are required by the CCA
and its supporting regulations. Some websites provide substantially more content than
others and some are more reliant on links to third party content. Few council websites
identify and organize content in terms of organizational and individual stakeholders, nor
is content tailored for small businesses.
Despite, in several cases, large amounts of textual content, websites are didactic,
superficial and lacking in integration. Often ignoring important stakeholders, content
conveys compliance and misses an opportunity to generate and maintain awareness
about BCM. Such awareness is important since it has been found that up to three-
quarters of employees do not know whether their organization has a business continuity
plan (Savvas 2008), let alone for external stakeholders. Despite the mandate for web-
content related to CCA activities, such content offers differing and contrasting
indications of arrangements and activities by organizations (local authorities) that prima
facie have the same responsibilities under this legislation. Such content can only be
considered to be indications of what exists within the organization. Accordingly, this
raises the question about whether web content reflects the arrangements and activities.
In other words, while there is a differential representation of local authorities’
arrangements and activities, these may not be borne out in differentials in the actual
arrangements and activities undertaken by local authorities in fulfilment of their CCA
obligations. While content does not directly represent the role and expertise of local
authorities in fulfilling CCA duties, the content is, however, a visible indication of what
a local authority wishes its stakeholders (website visitors) to understand to be their role
and expertise.

CONCLUSION

The acuity of work in the field of BCM arose in the mid-1990s by demonstrating that
value preservation sprang from the voluntary and emergent adoption of BCM as an
ongoing and embedded organizational process. In contrast, the public sector has
undergone a more rapid and prescribed transformation in the pursuit of improved
resilience, yet websites only partially reflect and communicate arrangements to achieve
resilience through BCM. In the context of such recent changes, websites have the
potential to provide an additional communications channel to communicate widely and
cost-effectively about their activities, values, priorities and services. In the absence of
guidelines on the type, nature, volume and organization of content, county councils
have set out in a variety of ways to provide their stakeholders with information about
CCA responsibilities and BCM activities. Such organic development has been identified
for the first time in this study.
 Herbane: An evaluation of online content 937

This study offers a departure point in the evaluation of local authority website
content that is driven by policy developments and statutory obligations. It highlights
that despite equivalence of influence on authorities in this specific context, there are
widely differing approaches to the orientation and provenance of website content. This
raises a number of directions (upstream and downstream of the content itself) for future
research, including the need to examine how those charged with implementing the
CCA are engaged with the development and design of online content (an upstream
focus), to evaluate the effectiveness of local authority websites as a strategic
communicative tool to promote local community stakeholder resilience (a downstream
focus), and to examine differences between local authority content between and across
the devolved regions of the United Kingdom.
By establishing the topography of website content relating to the CCA and BCM
requirements among county councils in the UK, a tentative step has been taken in
examining how public organizations use new technologies as strategic communications
tools for new and changing activities, responsibilities and priorities. Such strategic
communications will become increasingly important as organizations accumulate
knowledge, experience and networks and develop a ‘resilience-based view’ in which
their emergency, risk and business continuity planning operate within an umbrella of
coherent activities designed to strengthen the resilience of local communities’ business
and infrastructure.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am grateful to two anonymous Public Management Review reviewers for their comments
on a previous version of this article.

NOTES
1 Although the Act does not explicitly refer to Business Continuity Planning (BCP) or plans, section 19 of the
Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (Contingency Planning) Regulations 2005 refers to the duty under section
2(1)(c) of the Act as a ‘duty to maintain business continuity plans or emergency plans’.
2 Note that the Act refers to ‘Contingency Planning’ rather than emergency planning.
3 For historical reviews, see Nemzow (1997) and Swartz et al. (2003).
4 By ‘page’ the authors are referring to the information that is displayed in an internet browser from a single
Uniform Resource Locator (URL).
5 It is still not always the case that studies explicitly report the process and outcome of inter-rater reliability
evaluations. See, for instance, Peyrefitte and David (2006) and Bell and Bryman (2007).
6 The difference between static versus dynamic URLs is, essentially, as follows: dynamic URLs request a
document from a database whereas static URLs take a more traditional approach and point to a file location
instead.
7 These included the Business Continuity Institute, Preparing for Emergencies, London Prepared, UK
Resilience, Local Community Risk Registers and the Emergency Planning Society.
938 Public Management Review

8 Character counts refer to the summation of individual letters used in relevant passages of text. Content was
coded as originating from a third party where the website explicitly stated that the text originated from
another website or organizational source.

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